Nothingism
Poetry at the End of Print Culture
Exploring the form and significance of poetry in a digital age
Description
What is the internet doing to poetry? Good question! In Nothingism, Jason Schneiderman grapples with the way that digital culture has begun to reshape America’s poetry landscape, examining this profound shift in the way that poetry is written, read, and taught. He dives into the history of the poetic line and how previous media (oral, manuscript, print) have shaped our understanding of exactly what a poem is. In considering the transformations of poetry in the digital age, he finds that the transition from print to digital culture mirrors the earlier transition from manuscript to print culture.
In this collection, the essays range from blistering manifesto to deep historical dives to gentle classroom guidance to considerations of the poems of James Merrill and Agha Shahid Ali, moving between the theoretical and the practical. Nothingism is both deeply personal and highly erudite, providing an engaging and scholarly account of reading, writing, and teaching poetry as our world continues its unsupervised lurch toward digital culture.
Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024). He also edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford, 2016). He is Professor of English at CUNY’s BMCC and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Reviews
"This diverse collection of literary essays is unified by the author’s personality and his probing response to the 'move away from poetry as a printed object toward poetry as a digital object.'. . . Recommended."
- B. Wallenstein, Choice
At once an (anti-) primer on pedagogy, poesy, and prophecy, Jason Schneiderman deftly blurs the lines in Nothingism. It's everything, as the digital natives say, taking on Emily Dickenson, Megan Thee Stallion, Agha Shahid Ali and James Merrill, and more, with acuity and care. The essay collection transcends Derridean aporias and Deleuzian lines of flight, Windows™ / windows and mirrors (psychoanalytic and metaphysical). This transdisciplinary work –mindf*ck, 'linefuck'—tears apart our assumptions about literature (and life)—I leave and return: elation, revelation, tears.
- Viet Lê, Author of Return Engagements and Co-author (with Latipa) of White Gaze
Beginning with a playful manifesto and ending with a meditation on friendship, Jason Schneiderman's Nothingism is no ordinary collection of essays 'about poetry.' What I love most about this book is how frequently Schneiderman brings forward a personal perspective, moments from the author's life, imbuing the writing's rigor and insight with a distinct and human presence. These are wonderful essays: charming, rigorous, and alive.
- Matthew S. Olzmann, author of Constellation Route
Why read a poem? Why read a hundred? What makes you less likely to read a hundred poems in a row than to read a hundred Tweets or Insta posts or emails, and why should the answer make you put down your phone? What's in a poetic line? Are poems bundled silently into codex books in English near the end of the line? Are we all linef*cked? If not, should we fall in line? How does one sonnet from 1958 'spiral out across the unknowability—or unspeakability—of love'? If you have students, what do your students want from you, and how can you learn when to give them what they want, and whether to give them something else? 'The loved one always leaves,' as one of Schneiderman's models loved and hurt to say, but these essays—these printed leaves— stick around: they're answers to questions that I wish I had long known how to ask. Stay with them.
- Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids
News, Reviews, Interviews
Listen: Interview in High Theory on the New Books Network | May 5, 2025